This year’s theme is Disrupt the Focus, a statement that questions which narratives are emphasized, and which are silenced. Rendezvous With Madness continues to be a platform for artists, whose lived experience expand our understandings of living with mental health and addiction.

To disrupt the focus is to challenge the systems that define and contain what it means to live with madness, to interrogate the stories that have been written about us rather than by us. Every artist featured in Rendezvous 2025 is a disruptor. They move beyond acceptable narratives of resilience and recovery to confront the intersectionality of lived experience.

Tending to What Remains is a multidisciplinary group exhibition that reimagines the gallery as a living garden: a shared ecosystem of care. Set within Workman Art’s BEING SCENE 2025, it explores how artists with lived experiences of displacement, intergenerational grief, or mental health struggles turn to organic and everyday materials such as herbs, cotton, hair, wax, paper, and sound, to reflect on trauma, recovery, and community resilience.

The final component to our BEING SCENE 2025 program is We Are the Earth with Bishara Elmi on Saturday, October 4th.

Join us in plantwalking and native wildflower seedbombing to support pollinators in pollinating all the plants we enjoy, from food to medicine to beautification of public spaces and our external ecosystems.